Garth Cartwright – Going for a Song (Flood Gallery Publishing, 2018)
If you are a music fan of a certain vintage, you probably have many fond memories of cruising the bins of your local record shops. Before the days of internet “add to cart” methods of purchasing music and downloading, this is what people did.
In his 2009 book Last Shop Standing, author Graham Jones wrote about some of the remaining record shops across Britain. As the founder of Proper Music Distribution, his job took him across the land to provide stock to numerous stores. In the process, he was able to get to know the people behind the scenes and tell their tales of the trials and tribulations of music retail.
Writer and music fan Garth Cartwright arrived in the UK from New Zealand some time after the explosion of the record industry in the sixties and seventies. With this book, he has attempted to put together the puzzle pieces of the British music retail industry from its very beginnings up to its current state.
As someone who has been a music fan since the sixties and worked in music retail myself (initially at the Windsor, Ontario Sam the Record Man store in the seventies), these type of stories attract my interest. Not least because of my interest in British music.
The story begins with the longest last shop in the UK which is Spillers in Cardiff, Wales. An institution since 1894, it is still in operation today.
Throughout the book, Cartwright covers the story from the inception of wax cylinders to shellac 78s, to vinyl and eventually to CDs. It’s a story which includes the large chains such as HMV to the myriad of small independent shops serving the local community.
Much of the focus is on the once ever-expanding music market of London. Of course, this place was a melting-pot of cultures from around the world. Stores opened to often feed the musical needs of specific ethnic communities. These could range from Jamaican reggae to African sounds to those of European countries.
By combing many print archives as well as interviewing several of the people involved in the industry over the years, Cartwright has been able to assemble the stories behind countless shops which have come and gone over the years.
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It’s an intriguing tale of ups and downs, devoted music fans, local heroes, scammers, gangsters and more. It manages to successfully tell the story of an industry that was virtually limitless in its expansion that eventually imploded at the dawn of the current century. The advent of internet downloading and CD burners put an end to that was once an important community of retail music . Suddenly, the experience of running to the shop to pick up the latest release from your favourite band was rendered almost obsolete.
Of course, not all of the shops have disappeared (thankfully) and the book also serves to shed light on the people who are still out there serving the community of music fans.
It’s an interesting story for those of us whose interest includes the history of the music industry. The book is exhaustively researched and presented in a very engaging and readable manner.
On a personal note… My first trip to the UK was in 1986. On that occasion, I had the good fortune to visit the fabulous Rock On in Camden Town and the original Virgin Megastore in London (as well as other smaller shops in Bath, Coventry, Stafford etc…).
I have been over a dozen more times since the late nineties and have had the pleasure to visit many more shops. I’ve been to a number of stores mentioned in the book as well as a few which were not. They include Probe Records (Liverpool), Record Collector (Sheffield), Crash Records, Jumbo and Relics (Leeds), Piccadilly Records, Vinyl Exchange, King Bee (Manchester), The Record Album (Brighton) and many, many others.
So, reading this book helped me to gain a perspective on the history of record shops across the UK.
